A gripping canter through the story of Troy at the British Museum
Troy: Myth and Reality takes in historical fact, legend and modern responses to the fable
“Strangers, the ash of ages has devoured me, Holy Ilion …but I shall be on the lips of all Greece.” Beautiful though the words of 5BC Greek writer Evenus of Ascalon may be, they have proved false. As the British Museum’s new exhibition devoted to Troy — as Ilion is now known — testifies, not only did the city’s fame spread far beyond Greece, but the actual metropolis, albeit with no proof that the Trojan war took place there, has been rediscovered.
The result is a gripping yet scholarly show which enriches our understanding of both myth and reality. Divided into three chapters, the voyage sails us through representations of the Trojan war in the ancient world, the rediscovery of the city’s site at Hisarlik in Turkey, and the story’s many iterations in modern culture.
In an effort to act as a microcosm of all three sections, a display in the opening room is the only one that fails to cohere. Iincludes artefacts such as an Athenian amphora made in 530BC depicting Achilles falling in love with a female warrior even as he murders her. But when a clutch of ancient clay pots unearthed at Hisarlik in the 19th century is placed alongside two large contemporary works — Cy Twombly’s painting “Vengeance of Achilles” and elements from Antony Caro’s sculptural installation “The Trojan War” — the delicate ancient objects are eclipsed by their clunky modern peers.
From here on, however, the curators do a marvellous job of weaving their constellation of texts, images and objects into a fragile, evanescent yet astonishingly resilient cosmos. The figure of Homer bestrides this world like a colossus, despite the reality that his two surviving poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are relatively brief.
There’s no definitive proof that Homer existed at all, although many scholars now think he probably lived during the eighth or early seventh century BC. Those dates coincide with the return of writing, which had first been used in Greece during the Bronze Age, then fallen out of use. It isn’t known when, how or by whom Homer’s tales — of Achilles’ apocalyptic quarrel with Agamemmnon and its bloody consequences, and of Odysseus’ ten-year voyage back to Ithaca — were first written down. But this exhibition offers a thrilling chance to see one of the earliest surviving remnants of Greek script. Found at Pithekoussai in Italy but made around 715BC in Teos — now in Turkey, but close to Smyrna and Chios where Homer is thought to have lived — this small two-handled cup, its surface broken and faded, bears scratchy and just perceptible lines of writing which proclaim that it is “the cup of Nestor” and possesses aphrodisiac powers.
This jest was probably inspired by the myth, recounted in Homer’s Iliad, but surely also by other contemporaneous bards, of the golden goblet that belonged to Greek king Nestor and was too heavy for ordinary men to lift. Its presence close to Naples, on the western fringes of the early Greek world, tells us that epic poetry had already traversed this burgeoning civilisation.
That was just the start. As writing spread, allied to images made by artisans, sculptors and painters, the ancestral sagas of gods, goddesses, heroes and mortals enraptured audiences throughout antiquity. Of the array on show here, outstanding examples include an Etruscan wall-painting of The Judgement of Paris from c.560-550BC which includes a startling depiction of Aphrodite hitching up her skirt to show off a hint of leg.
Such unexpectedly imaginative — though rarely feminist — explorations of the familiar characters abound. A wall-painting from Pompei shows Helen being manhandled aboard a ship bound for Troy, her wan, hesitant expression a world away from the woman condemned in 458BC by classical playwright Aeschylus as “the destroyer of ships, destroyer of men, destroyer of cities”. (The galleries are sprinkled with wonderfully evocative quotations.) Meanwhile, a Roman sarcophagus found in Ephesus, Turkey, where it had been repurposed as decoration for the city gates, shows Achilles as a toned, handsome hero slumped in grief as the body of his beloved Patroclus, who has died fighting while Achilles sulked, is heaved towards him on another man’s shoulders.
The myths flourished but Troy itself was abandoned around 600AD. In the late 19th century, the German pioneer Heinrich Schliemann started to excavate at Hisarlik in north-western Turkey, on advice from British archeologist Frank Calvert who had already dug there. Schliemann’s contribution — from charges that he compromised the site to his decision to smuggle out the cache of gold known as Priam’s treasure, whose ownership is now disputed between Germany and Russia — is controversial. Although the display here includes the famous photograph of his wife Sophia wearing the golden diadem and earrings known as the “Jewels of Helen”, part of Priam’s troublesome booty, the curators concentrate on what a trove of humble vessels and fragments can tell us about a city whose first stones were laid in 3000BC but which was revealed to comprise nine settlements compressed into layers.
The crucial strata is Troy VI-VIIa (from 1750BC-1180BC). If the Trojan war did take place, it’s thought to have occurred between 1200BC and 1400BC. Evidence for this chronology comes via the study of objects such as a a tiny clay fragment (c1280BC) inscribed with Hittite cuneiform which testifies to an alliance Wilusa (as the Hittites called Troy) had made with them to sustain them in conflicts against Mycenae in Greece.
The final section of this show is a vibrant canter through more modern responses to the Trojan fable. From a 15th-century Italian marriage chest depicting Odysseus on his travels as Penelope sits obediently at her loom — designed to leave new Renaissance brides in no doubt of their conjugal duties — to Marian Maguire’s series of lithographs “Titokowaru’s Dilemma” (2010-11), which borrow elements of the Trojan war story to shed light on the colonisation of New Zealand, their variety reveals that our fascination with human desire, loss, failure, courage and hubris is timeless and universal.
Perhaps the most forceful expression is found in a film clip of Queens of Syria, (2016), a retelling of Euripides’ Trojan Women by Syrian refugees that was performed at London’s Young Vic theatre, among other places. A walltext includes a quote by one member of the cast, named Maha: “Troy’s story is very similar to Syria’s story, its women, its children, the country that was destroyed …we all lived the real experience.” It’s bittersweet to know that Troy’s melodrama of war, displacement and homecoming has never been more relevant than today.
To March 8, britishmuseum.org